


nothing but my crown on

by words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)



Series: hey brother [2]
Category: Chronicles of the Kencyrath - P. C. Hodgell
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, F/M, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Porn with Feelings, and SOMEONE has to talk about it, but it could have, it didn't, like it COULD have happened, so it might as well be me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-17
Updated: 2018-04-17
Packaged: 2019-04-24 02:37:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14346210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight
Summary: The Knorth lordan spent three days at Gothregor, between Tentir and Kothifir.  It was the first time she and her brother were in the same building and speaking to each other for more than a few hours since they were children.





	nothing but my crown on

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [two crowns (ready to go to war like)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14345979) by [words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight). 



> This is a direct AU of the second-to-last scene in [two crowns](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14345979), in which I take shameless advantage of the ONE AND ONLY TIME that Jame and Tori were in the same place with good emotional math in basically the whole series. There is neither plot nor shame here.

Jame paused before knocking on the door at the top of the stairs, then took a deep breath and steeled herself.

“Come in,” Tori called as soon as she’d applied her knuckles to the wood, and Jame pushed it open to find him rising to his feet from his seat on top of a chest near the window.  She noticed, amused, that he was dressed much like she was, right down to the bare feet.

“Couldn’t sleep?” she asked, tipping her head toward his perch and trying not to let the rush of wistfulness show on her face.  He had always loved to look out at the stars when they were wakeful as children, even though the Haunted Lands hadn’t offered much of a view before the Barrier blocked the sky.  Jame hadn’t cared as much for the stars then—too aware of the Master’s House pressing forward out of the shadows.

“Neither could you, I take it.”

Jame shook her head, closing the door behind her, and politely bowed to Yce, who opened an eye from her prize position on the hearth for just long enough to identify the intruder and disregard her as unworthy of attention.  Folding her legs up underneath her, Jame settled on the end of Tori’s bed and gave him a steady look, daring him to turn her out.  Instead, he sat down with his back to the headboard, one leg folded up to his chest and the other outstretched, and raked a hand back through his hair wearily.

There was a long beat of silence, the only sound the sullen crackling of the low-banked fire in his hearth, and Jame breathed in the sensation of having Tori close to her, of having that indefinable aching hollow in her chest vanish.  After so long apart, she had wondered, at first, at how automatically she missed him.  She hadn’t wondered long.

Jame looked away from her brother, letting her eyes wander around the room instead.  She recognized it, and not just from her headlong flight the night of her departure from Gothregor—here was the window that Kallystine had passed in front of, there the place where she had abandoned her elaborate overgown.  Tori had been newly made Highlord, then, and he had since removed a majority of the ornate furniture that she had seen in the dream, replacing their ancestors’ riches with the sparse and functional things that filled the space now.  A bed, a chair, a table.  All of them well-made but plain, out of dark wood that glowed faintly russet in the firelight.  Jame was grimly glad to see it.  No touch of Kallystine or, worse, of Ganth here, only her brother’s fine, handsome lines.

“Do you remember when we snuck out onto the battlements to see that meteor shower?” he asked at last.

“And we scared Ton so badly he almost fell over the wall?”  Jame grinned.  “I remember being confined to our rooms for a week.”

“I didn’t mean to startle Ton like that,” Tori said, amused.  “And it was your idea to sneak out.”

“But you took the lecture and the punishment right along with me.”

Tori smiled, faint and a little wistful himself, and Jame wondered, abruptly, what things he remembered most vividly about her child-self.  The way she had held onto him during their father’s rampages, or the time she had broken his nose trying to trick him into teaching her to fight? 

“Of course I did,” Tori said quietly. 

Jame matched his smile, small and not quite sad, and reached out her hand.  There was only the briefest pause before he took it.

Tori caught her hand in his, and turned it over to let the firelight shine on her claws, his thumb sliding hesitantly over the curve of the nail that laid flush against her index finger.  Jame held perfectly still, as if trying to charm a nervous wild animal, and tried not to obsess.  Were his hands shaking, or was she imagining it?  Was that disdain on his face or just weariness?

“They taught you to use them, at Tentir, right?” Tori asked, voice unreadable.

“Yes,” Jame whispered.  She’d thought she was past this, the rush of guilt at admitting to the use of her claws, but she curled her hand down without thinking, trying to hide the ivory from his eyes.  “There’s an old fighting style called the Arrin-thar based on clawed gauntlets.  Bear—he taught me.”

Tori nodded, slow, almost thoughtful, and turned her hand over again to show her claws, forcibly enough to override her childlike resistance.  Jame allowed it with ill grace, let him uncurl her fingers until they were spread loosely on his palm, across the scars.

“I didn’t ever see them, before you—before you were gone,” he said.  “I was unconscious in that upper room.”

“I know,” Jame said, staring at her hand so that she didn’t have to look at his face.  “Did you expect something different?”  _Something monstrous?  Am I what our father promised you I would become?_  

He hummed, a low sound of indecision, and released her.  “You got a white stone for Bear, didn’t you?”

“Among other things.  I’m sure Commandant Sheth will pay for it, when his lord finds out that I passed Tentir because he ensured it.”  Jame shook her head, curling her hands into her lap.  “Caldane always chews up the best of his house.”

“He’ll regret it, eventually,” Tori said. 

Jame nodded, thoughtful, and started to say something that was cut off by a sudden movement in the corner of her vision—Yce, rising to her feet with something that could only be a scowl.  If her friend and his sister couldn’t be troubled to be quiet and let her sleep, she would go find another hearth to curl up on.  She paced to the door and fixed the bed with a stare until Jame rose to let her out onto the landing.

“She could have opened it herself,” Tori said, amused, as Jame closed the door.

“I think she was putting me in my place.”  Jame smiled, nervous, almost shy, as she walked back to the bed, and came to a slow stop at arm’s length. 

She hated feeling off-kilter, and Tori brought it out in her like no one else, not even the randon with their silent expectations at Tentir or even Graykin with his desperate need to prove his worth by proving hers.  Tori was hearth and home and heart, all that the Kencyrath had ever been to her, the face of a people she had missed all her life, with her soul, darkened and marred as it might be, in his hands.  For all that Jame sought approval from her teachers, from her commanders, even from her subordinates, and felt its lack keenly when she failed, she knew—and Tori knew, in his better moments, she hoped—that no one else had the power to thoroughly break her.  To ruin her utterly as not even forgotten Mullen had been ruined.  Perhaps even to topple her from the knife’s edge, back into the shadows.

It must have been a hard thing for a creator, she thought dimly as they observed each other in the firelight, to hold such absolute power to destroy.

Tori offered a hand, and for a moment, breathless and dizzy, Jame saw the room warp around her, the firelight painting red ribbons that rippled and writhed, her plain shirt heavy, moving, _living_ as tails twitched at her throat.

Then he said, “You look cold.”

The sketchy impression of the Master’s bedchamber vanished, and Jame took his hand.  The faint texture of the scars, a roughness networked over his skin, grounded her in the present, and she tightened her grip until her knuckles paled.  He didn’t flinch.

She remembered this, Jame thought as she took another step forward, until her knees bumped into the bed.  But not quite.  This time Tori’s room didn’t have their ancestors’ ornate decorations, nor any red ribbons, nor any trace of another dreamer.  There was only her brother, looking at her with those tired eyes, the pupils blown wide in eclipse of the silver.

Jame paused, her hand in Tori’s, and groped blindly for the right words.  Something to offer him at this last juncture, a choice, a way out if he should want to take it.  Tori had always been afraid of inevitability as a boy, and Jame had always been his protector, and now, now she needed the words to offer him protection from this, if he chose it.

“You don’t have to,” she finally whispered.

“Neither do you,” he said.  “It’s probably not the smart thing to do.  Are you going back to bed?”

Jame lingered, paused.  _Was_ she?

“Damn it,” she said. 

Tori smiled uncertainly at her, and she closed the distance between them in a rush.  Jame’s bruised and aching jaw sent a spark of pain down a nerve as Tori’s hand grazed the skin, his fingers passing down her neck and shoulder to settle at the base of her ribs as she kissed him.  His beard, kept short and neat, was strange, scratching lightly against her skin.  Kneeling up on the bed, over his thighs, Jame had another flash of memory from the dream they had shared, and settled her hands at the curve of Tori’s neck, where she could lace her fingertips into his hair and see if it was as soft as she recalled. 

 They drew apart for a moment, and Jame met Tori’s eyes, wide and startled.  She was sure her own looked much the same, her hands almost shaking with the racing beat of her heart.

_Are we sure about this?_ Tori’s gaze seemed to ask.  His hand that had been holding hers came to rest on her waist, cool fingers curving around the sharp point of her pelvis and thumb slipping under her shirt to spark fire against her skin.

“When have I ever done the smart thing,” Jame breathed.

Something stirred under her ribs, at the small of her back, and she shifted, trying to resettle her skin, and Tori gasped against her lips. 

“Gently,” he murmured into her mouth.  Jame let her hands curl down around the front of his neck to the laces of his shirt as his hand at her ribs slipped around to press against her back, pulling her closer to him.  She could feel his fingers catch at the ends of her hair like he had when they were children, then spread broad across her spine.  The stirring, like something alive in the cradle of her bones, crept lower, and she hesitated for a moment—bravado was well and good, as was theory, but in practice…  Save for her bloody kiss with Bane and her sole kiss with Tori, for the dreams that Timmon had tried so often to craft, the most experience she had with this was the Senetha, and her disastrous near-investment as the new Mistress.

Tori sensed her pause and his hand rose from her hip to cup her jaw, so lightly that the bruise there barely twinged.  His eyes were still wide and dark, the weight of their full attention almost enough to make Jame breathless.  Was this was others felt like, when she turned her focus on them?  Was this why so many people flinched under her gaze?  She sympathized, suddenly.  Like the sun had been extinguished with a snap of the fingers and a pair of silver eyes held all the light the world could hope for.

He didn’t say anything, as Jame tipped her cheek absently into his palm, but she could read the echo of her offered escape as clear as day. 

_You don’t have to_.

_To hell with that,_ Jame replied silently, and Tori’s lips quirked into a dry smile.

“I don’t know what to do,” Jame said as his thumb grazed over her cheekbone.  _Oh, touch me again_ , she remembered, and recalled a vague impression of the remainder of that thought, but that had been a dream, half a nightmare.  She didn’t know how to apply it to the reality.  “Teach me.”

Tori’s smile, to her surprise, grew a fraction, and his thumb passed lower to catch on her lip.  “Are you planning to break my nose again?”

Jame grinned down at him, startled.  “Are you planning to deny me again, because I’m a _lady_?”

His hand traced back and sank into her hair, his long fingers cradling the nape of her neck where it joined the base of her skull, and Tori looked up at her with warmth, even humor, in his eyes.

“I think we can both agree that you’re many things, but not much of a lady.”  He hesitated for a moment, his hand tensing briefly against her skin where it was thoroughly tangled in her hair.  “If you—if you wanted me to make you a contract with someone else, this would—”

“Tori,” Jame said, closing her hands sharply in the fabric of his shirt.  She felt the cloth give way under the point of one claw.  “If you turn me off now for the sake of some future contract—which you had _better_ not be planning for me,” she added sternly, “—I might reconsider breaking your nose.”  The threat was easy, fell from her lips effortlessly, and Jame hoped that the sudden flash of alarm was hidden behind it, the flare of _please, no, no one else, you promised_.  Except, of course, that he had promised nothing of the kind, save whatever she could fight for as lordan.

The moment of anxiety faded as Tori nodded, a flicker of what she thought was relief crossing his face as he kissed her again.

“Here,” Tori murmured against her lips, and the hand at her back pulled her closer, and—yes, that was good, that was better, her weight resting more fully on his folded legs and the warmth of his body chasing away the last chill of wandering Gothregor at night.  Her chest was tight, a flush rising high on her cheeks, and her skin seemed to fit her poorly, but Tori’s hands were steady for all that his touch was light enough that she could have shaken him away with less effort than pushing away a jewel-jaw.  Jame’s hands were still curled in his shirt, the knuckles of one hand brushing against the plane of his chest, and she could feel his heart keeping rapid pace with hers.

Tori’s tongue traced lightly against her lower lip, and Jame opened her mouth thoughtlessly to deepen the kiss, pulling him closer and tilting her head so that her hair fell around them like a curtain.  The thing that had stirred under her ribs had settled into the cradle of her hips, foreign and half-painful, like a sharp tug on a cord rooted in her spine, and she rocked forward absently, trying to ease the tension.  Under her, Tori gasped, sounding almost surprised, and she did it again, intentionally this time, hiding her grin against his mouth.

“May I?” he murmured against her jaw, tugging lightly at her shirt, and Jame nodded, straightening to let him pull it over her head and toss it aside.  She had never seen her brother drop clothing carelessly on the floor before.  Now, he didn’t even glance aside to see where it fell, watching her with those eyes in full eclipse, as if he was seeing an impossibility.

Kneeling over him, almost in his lap, dressed in breeches and firelight, Jame wondered if he liked what he saw.  She wasn’t quite bony, now, a little less the famine’s filly she had been accused of being outside of Tai-tastigon, the training at Tentir had put some muscle on her, but she didn’t doubt that she could still have fooled the Thieves Guild.  When she took a deep breath, her ribs still pressed against her skin.

Tori’s hands took her by surprise, fitting themselves tentatively into the spaces between her ribs, as if to hold her together.

Jame smiled at him, and his hands settled down to her waist, where the points of her hips threatened to push right through the flesh but fit neatly into the hollows of his palms.  This time, when she rocked into him, he pushed back, and a spark jumped down her spine, and—oh.  _Touch me again_ …

“Yes,” Jame hissed, and kissed him so fiercely that she felt her bruised jaw protest.  Tori closed his arms around her and pulled her so close that she could feel his heartbeat against her chest, her hands laced into his hair again as she straddled his hips.  Half-hesitant—unsure of how to proceed, but then that had never stopped her—she shifted her weight against him and ground down against the hardness there, until Tori’s breathing went ragged against her lips and heat poured through her chest, through her belly, to pool between her legs.

“You,” Tori said as he kissed her throat, her shoulder, “are so beautiful.”

“Mm,” Jame hummed, fingers dancing down to the laces of his shirt again, this time palming the cord out of its loops and giving the fabric a sharp tug.  Tori obliged her, letting her toss his shirt after hers, and she pressed a palm to his chest, over his heart, as his hands smoothed over her back.  Then he sat very still in her shadow, cast by the flames behind her, his hands loose on the curve of her thighs as he let her study him. 

Tori had a handful of scars flecked here and there, some familiar to her—this one she had seen in a dream of a falling building, that one he had gotten falling from a ladder when they were small—and others unknown.  He looked as fragile as Jame did, her thief’s fingers counting ribs as she slid her hands down his chest, the same match of bone with sparse muscle and skin without much else, almost breakable. 

They had the same shoulders, Jame decided, and were the same height, so thin that their torsos were almost identical in silhouette—that must be where the mistakes were made, besides the classic Knorth coloring.  Shoulders narrow but level, coming to sharp points with the sudden swoop of the collarbone ducking down.  Tori carried their shared bones well, better than his twin perhaps because he had been in a position to grow into them properly, rather than waking up in a body that had grown up without him.  But then, Jame allowed as she trailed the pads of her fingers down that collarbone, she was the better dancer.

His eyes flickered closed as her fingers came to rest in the hollow of his throat, nails well away from the delicate skin, and Jame bent, almost absently, to apply first lips, then teeth to the curve of his neck.  This time, when she shifted her hips, Tori’s hands closed sharply on her legs, and Jame tucked a grin into his shoulder. 

“Jame,” Tori breathed.

“This is your show, brother dear,” Jame said, finding the scar from the falling building—maybe architectural damage ran in the family after all—and tracing it with first fingers, then tongue.  Once, she had known Tori down to the childish creases around his eyes when he smiled.  This was a new map, a new maze, and she was determined to learn it again.  “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“On that,” Tori said, “I do not agree.”

“On which?”

He closed his arms around her and Jame had just enough time to recognize an earth-moving lock before she was on her back, blinking up at her brother.  She’d tossed a leg around his waist in an automatic response, a way to keep control if this had been a fight, and she kicked him lightly in the thigh, but he didn’t flinch.

“Both.  Either,” Tori said as he wrapped a wayward coil of hair around his finger and drew it away from her neck.  He was propped on his forearms, close enough that all she had to do was go up halfway on her elbows to bring their lips together again. 

Possibly fair.

Tori pulled back for a moment, looking down at her, and Jame grinned.

“Do you remember…” he started.

“That dream Timmon tried to drag me into?  That’s what I was thinking.”

Tori shook his head, seemingly torn between exasperation and amusement, and ducked down to kiss her again, then her jaw, her throat, her shoulder.  Jame bucked up underneath him as heat and sparks turned into a real ache, almost like hunger, and he made a satisfied sound, lips parting against her skin in a smile. 

Jame called him a particularly nasty name in Easternese that made him snort, until she added, “You’re _jealous_ of that Ardeth brat, aren’t you?”

“Mm,” Tori said, and bit her.  Not hard, just enough to make her yelp and knock one of his legs out from under him, bringing him down onto her with a huff—and, oh, that was _good_ , having him pressed against her, Jame realized, momentarily distracted from one revelation by another.  She tightened her legs around him so that he couldn’t get away.

“You are,” she said, delighted, and Tori propped himself up on his forearms again.

“You can’t prove anything,” he said with a scowl.

“And yet, I feel like I’ve proven a great deal,” Jame said, pleased, and arched her back to press against him, twisted her hips until she dragged a groan from his lips.  One of her hands, sliding down his side, caught at the waist of his breeches.  She pushed at them, and Tori kicked them off, to join their shirts on the floor.

This part, this was less foreign.  Jame was well-acquainted with men, women, and everything in between generally, and, thanks to Timmon’s insistent dream-walking, specifically familiar with Tori.  It was a shame she couldn’t tell anyone about this, because Timmon’s frustration would doubtless be amusing, but Jame had to grant that she owed him one. 

Jame kicked off her own breeches before she could question it, then reached down.  He dragged in a breath between his teeth when she closed an experimental hand around his cock, gentle at first, then firmer.  It was a delicate task, keeping her nails clear—out of all her complaints about her Shanir nature, this one hadn’t much occurred to her until just now. 

Tori let his head bow under her careful exploration, and she kissed his cheek and the point of his jaw, took his ear in her teeth and tugged, and reveled in the feeling of his breathing going shallow and quick against her skin.

“Enough,” he said at last, quietly, bumping her hand aside neatly.  “My turn.”

His hand came to rest on her leg, the sensitive inner skin of her thigh—sure of himself and yet hesitant, still leaving her a chance to turn him away, Jame thought.  Reaching up, she laced one hand into his hair, scratching the tips of her claws lightly across his skin.  A reminder—she was armed, her weapons bound into her bones, and he was not, and if she wanted to turn him away, she could do it.  Tori shuddered and closed his eyes, and she pulled him ungently down to meet her lips as his hand moved higher.

“Yes?” Tori whispered against her mouth as his scarred fingers slid over her, and Jame made an affirmative sound, murmured deep in her throat as she arched up into his touch.  His thumb caught and circled, sending a jolt of almost-pain through her core—not entirely unlike being stabbed in the shock of it, Jame thought dizzily as she opted to close her fist on the bedsheets, rather than his shoulder. 

“Trinity,” Jame breathed, and Tori kissed her again. 

Time grew liquid, the way she usually associated with being drunk—the firelight that caught in Tori’s silvered hair and glowed around them seemed as thick as honey, and the sound of her own breathing was loud in her ears, almost gasping.  Her chest ached, a tightness that grew with each stroke of his fingers until she reached down to catch his wrist in an iron grip.

His touch stilled at once and a different ache opened beneath her ribs.  Her brother, always so worried, always trying to do right.  She loved him for it, for the way he had fretted over her when they were children and the endless effort he put into being better for her, for their people, now.

“Do you want me to stop?” Tori asked.

Did she?  Jame didn’t know, her heart beating so hard in the skin of her throat and fingers and cunt that it _hurt_ , like the fresh bruise on her face.  She was—scared, she realized, and that answered the question.

Jame had heard horror stories, in the Women’s World, girls whispering about wedding nights.  They always stopped short when the wayward Knorth drew close—almost a shame, she probably knew more on the subject than their teachers had ever told them, if Lyra and her wide-eyed alarm at being more or less thrown into Tori’s arms was any indication—but she knew that most Highborn women didn’t much enjoy being bedded by lords.  But Tori was her twin, and for all the casual harm they had ever done each other, she trusted him.  More than she trusted her own treacherous instincts, with their penchant for disaster.

“No,” she said, closing her legs around him and setting her jaw.  She rocked her hips up sharply in case he didn’t understand, and bared her teeth at him in something that probably didn’t look much like a smile when she won a ragged hiss from his lips in response.

“Jame,” Tori said, touching her face with one hand. 

“Tori.”  She tipped her cheek into his palm and met his gaze.  _Last chance_ , she tried to tell him, and he didn’t blink.

He sank into her slowly, still trying so hard to be careful, and Jame bucked into him, gasping at the sudden rush of sensation and feeling the claws clenched in the sheets tear fabric.  The stretch was strange, foreign, and left her breathless, half-clinging to Tori.

His hand touched her face again as he stilled, cupped her unbruised cheek and turned her face toward his, so that their noses bumped together and Tori could look into her eyes.

“All right?” he asked, and Jame carefully, one finger at a time, untangled her hand from his hair.

Her palm fit as perfectly to his cheek as his did to hers.  So close, Jame could see that Tori’s eyes were still all pupil, like the moon in full eclipse, and overbright, their regard heavy enough to send something shivering across her skin.  She could feel his hand trembling slightly—so was her own.

Jame used her hand to tip Tori’s head down, until she could press his forehead to hers, and nodded.

“Good,” she said, and rolled her hips up experimentally.

This was not unlike when they had danced earlier, Jame decided hazily as Tori ducked his head to mouth at her neck and rocked into her, still cautious—push and counter-push, letting the tension build in her chest rather than gathering power.  Touching and touched, she thought as she arched her back, pressing closer to Tori and winning a soft sound from his throat.  But better, in its way, a rising tide that she didn’t have to fear.  The ease of the Senetha, the pure physical rush of the dance, was tempered with the memory of losing herself between the steps, the sharp awareness of the knife’s edge underfoot.  This was simply…

Good.

The tension in Jame’s chest and belly shifted _need_ and _hunger_ , and she gasped, arching into Tori as her hand closed sharply on his shoulder.  He made a noise that was almost a groan, and his hips snapped forward sharply, and Jame’s claws clutched at his back as she hissed, “ _Yes,_ Tori.”

“Jame,” Tori said, as if her name had been torn out of his chest.

“Brother,” she breathed.  “I won’t break.”

“Sister,” Tori said against her lips, laughing and breathless and shaking.  “I might.”  But he did as she demanded, thrust into her harder, until they were both breathing raggedly into each other’s mouths. 

The hand that wasn’t tight on Jame’s hip found its way into her hair, not half as punishing a grip as her own on the nape of his neck, a delicate point of reality as heat bled through her veins.  The limits of her body seemed blurred, except where Tori’s touch held her inside her skin, where they bled together—this was right, this was as things were meant to be, Jame thought dimly, as close as they could get to sharing blood and bone the way they had always shared dreams and soul.  Tori was hers, her twin, her partner, her soul in skin, he was _hers_ , and nothing anyone did could ever change that, not him, not Timmon, not Kallystine, not even their father. 

Dragging his mouth down to kiss him fiercely, Jame tried to stamp the truth of it on his soul.

It took Jame by surprise, when she came—it was like breaking, like coming apart, like her nerves catching fire as lights burst behind her eyes.  Tori’s climax rolled through her almost as strongly as her own, in a moment of confusion as she opened her eyes and saw her own face beneath her, felt both their hearts racing in her chest.

Jame didn’t know how long they shook against each other, into each other, only that she didn’t remember closing her eyes and that, when she opened them, Tori’s head was bent to her shoulder as he breathed.  She nosed into his hair, using the hand at his neck to pull him down onto her.  Tori was as bird-fragile as she was, too light to be an unpleasant weight on her chest, and he turned his head to press an absent kiss to the pulse under her jaw, drawing a hand through her curls.

“Tori,” Jame murmured.

“Yes?” he said, low enough that his voice shivered through his chest into her bones.  A burst of sadness flared in her chest, for that moment of sharing Tori’s skin, and died as swiftly as it had come.  She was too tired and lax to cling to the thought.  This would be close enough, for the time being.  He raised his head to kiss her cheek, and there was banked concern in his voice when he asked, “Are you all right?”

“More than.  Will Burr have a conniption if he finds me here tomorrow?” she asked, and Tori chuckled, wearily, still stroking her hair.

“I don’t care,” he admitted, propping himself up on his elbows.  “Burr will survive.  And,” he added with a rueful cock of his head, “while I’m sure it would scandalize plenty of sensibilities, we haven’t done anything wrong in the letter of the Law.”

“You are Lord Knorth, and I the last of the Knorth women,” Jame agreed, offering a rueful smile of her own.  Then her expression grew very wry, almost smug.  “And given the givens, I’m sure that sleeping with my lord brother uncontracted would be the least of the Matriarch’s concerns about me.”

Tori’s thumb swept over her scarred cheek as he laughed, and he shifted, sitting up and away from Jame as he cast around for something.  He came up with his discarded shirt and offered it to Jame to clean up, and she paused as she tossed it aside, reaching up to touch the back of his shoulder gently.  There were five straight lines, as clean as if they had been cut with razors and perfectly parallel, that drew a path from the point of his shoulder blade not quite to the curve of his neck—not deep, not even still bleeding, but stark.

“I’m sorry,” she said.  “Do they hurt?”

“Does your hip?” Tori returned, gesturing as he folded himself to sit next to her again, and Jame looked down in surprise.  They both had a handful of marks from lips and teeth scattered in loose mirrors, although none that could be seen over clothing, but she could see which one he meant without trouble.  Around the point of her hip, his hand had left a mark that was slowly darkening into a bruise, pale purple against the skin.

“Fair enough,” Jame conceded.  She lay down again, under the sheet and blanket this time, and smiled at him.  “Do you think you’ll be able to sleep, now?”

Tori smiled at her and curled up beside her—still so hesitant.  Jame took it upon herself to fit them together, as close as possible, like they had when they slept in the same bed as children, her back pressed to the warm skin of his chest, their legs tangled, his face pressed into her hair.  He wrapped an arm tightly around her waist and sighed against the nape of her neck, holding her so tightly that she wondered if he had felt the same rush of sorrow at not sharing her skin that she had.

She linked her fingers with his, where they curled around her, and closed her eyes, and thought, _mine_.

Jame fell asleep too quickly to be surprised by the ease of it, but not too quickly to know that Tori, behind her, slept first.

**Author's Note:**

> If I feel motivated, I might write another chapter to this of Burr coming to check on his lord in the morning, but here's a preview:
> 
> Burr, slipping into Tori's room: "I found an ounce and wolver asleep in the lordan's room and I'm a little worried."  
> Burr, noticing that Tori has a set of fresh scratches: "Now I am VERY worried, it would not be unheard of for him to get hurt literally in his sleep."  
> Burr, taking a few more steps: "OH."  
> Burr, leaving as quietly as possible with information more valuable than his life: "Rowan owes me money."


End file.
